John 6 BIGELOW

15145.1 John 6 BIGELOW,
son of John 5 ( John 4, John 3,
Samuel 2, John
1)
and Mary ( ___ ) BIGELOW was born 05 March 1774 at Goshen,
Hampshire
county, MA. At the age of twenty he left his home in Cummington, MA,
and
moved to Salem, NY, where he taught school for three years. In 1797 he
married Lydia Benedict, daughter of Lewis and Jemima (Newman) Benedict.
Later they moved to Broome, Schoharie County, NY, where they lived for
15 years, and where seven of their children were born. In 1815 John and
Lydia packed their
household goods and eight children into two Conestoga wagons. With
three
horses and two oxen they headed west.
Stopping briefly at Buffalo, they loaded their
entire
outfit onto a boat--wagons, beasts, freight, and humans, and sailed for
Ohio.
They landed at Cleveland, which was at that time a very small village
on
Lake Erie. They lived for a year at what is now the corner of East
Fourth
and Euclid Avenue in the heart of Cleveland. They had a small plot of
land
which they farmed while looking for a place to make their permanent
home.
They occupied a log house already standing, which was later taken apart
and
moved to Richfield when they relocated to the land that John bought by
paying
off both the rightful owner and the occupant.
John was elected the first clerk of Richfield
township,
Summit county, which was formed in 1816, an office he held for many
years.
John's original log house also served over the years as church,
schoolhouse,
town hall, social hall, and occasionally as jail. In 1830 John built a large
house (see below), three
stories high, with 14 rooms, eight fireplaces, and four staircases.
His initials, J.B., are carved above the door. The third floor was
originally
used for spinning, weaving, and cheese-curing. While the property is no
longer
in Bigelow hands, it is now remodeled and in good condition, though the
profile
is somewhat altered and the front chimneys removed.
John was a great advocate of freeing the
slaves in
the south. In his house one fireplace in the basement hides an entrance
into
a small room which is said to have been a hiding place for runaway
slaves,
and this was a station of the Underground Railroad, in hiding fugitives
for
their escape into Canada and freedom. Tradition says that a secret
tunnel
led from the Bigelow home to the next hiding place, but the present
owner
of the house has never found any evidence of its existence. Since John
died
twenty years before the Civil War, this help to the blacks probably was
carried
on by his family. Lydia, mother of 10, grandmother of 49, would never
have
allowed a fugitive, whether black or white, to go away hungry.
We have a handwritten record that says John
died
in 1842 and Lydia in 1863. Howe's Bigelow genealogy varies in claiming
John
died in 1838 and Lydia in 1866. No headstone remains to identify in
which
cemetery they are buried. In addition to her own family, Lydia raised
the
three surviving children of her deceased daughter Elsy. Lydia
frequently went
to Cleveland and back by horse. One day her horse threw Lydia, crushing
one
leg so badly that amputation was necessary. She went through the
operation without any anaesthesia, but the folded man-size handkerchief
which she held
clenched in her teeth was chewed to bits at the end of the ordeal. As
soon
as the stump of her leg healed, she placed it on the seat of a chair
and
soon resumed her household activities using the chair as a walker. The
old
chair that had been Lydia's walker is still owned by the family (1986).